Readers have been submitting their most memorable Mardi Gras moments. Here are a few of our favorites:
My favorite Mardi Gras was the 2006 “Reunion,” when the normal running into your friends you hadn’t seen since the year before became one of unabashed weeping with joy: he or she had survived Katrina. I managed to get home that year and the sheer creativity was jaw-dropping. Who knew so many different outfits could be made out of blue tarps? I dressed as the “Ice Fairy,” and handed out “Heck-of-a-job, brownie ice dollars.”
The most embarrassing, and therefore memorable, was the year I dressed as a sort of Scheherazade with an emerald green dupioni silk jacket and elaborate hat. I hadn’t eaten breakfast, and by the time I drove from Hammond and got to the Bywater, where I parked my car near NOCCA, I was pretty hungry. I walked toward the Quarter, smoking and downing the contents of my screwdriver. Between imbibing on an empty stomach and the anti-depressant I’d taken before I left, a couple of hours later I was sound asleep on Royal near Canal. When I woke up, I was horrified at what I’d done, and could just imagine the headline screaming across the front of the T-P the next day: SOCIETY PHOTOGRAPHER NO BETTER THAN A COMMON DRUNK: Found asleep on the street in the Quarter. Oh, the humanity!
— Darlene Olivo
Making Mardi Gras floats out of shoeboxes at LaSalle School.
— Dee Ratterree
My favorite Mardi Gras story is the day I didn’t have to go.
— Hudson Marquez
During my first NOLA Mardi Gras season in the early seventies I was eating a piece of King Cake (my first) at a party and started choking on something hard. I finally got it out and it was a plastic baby!! What?? Everybody started applauding me for getting Baby Jesus but all I could think of at the time was how happy I survived it.
— Steve Puckett
Hot chick waitin’ on da porta potty in the Muses Pardade.
— John Ryan
Do you have a fond, embarrassing, or outrageous Mardi Gras moment you’d like to share with us? Email your Mardi Gras moments to editor@nolavie.com and you might see it published on our site.
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